17. Kylie
Kylie
The county board meets the third Tuesday of the month in a room built for twelve, and tonight there are two hundred people trying to get into it.
They’re in the hall. They’re on the steps.
Deputy Gil propped the doors, set folding chairs down the corridor, and gave up on the fire code around six-fifteen.
I walk in at six-thirty with my mother’s library ledger under my arm and a speech I rewrote four times, and the whole room turns to look at me.
A month ago that would have stopped my heart cold. Tonight I look right back at them.
Somebody hung a SAVE OUR LIbrARY sign in the window that faces the board table, so it’s the first thing the members see when they glance up from their paperwork.
Novaleen is passing cupcakes down the rows like communion.
The knitting circle has claimed the front bench and is knitting straight through it, needles clicking like a countdown.
My hands are cold around the ledger. I press my thumb to the inside of my wrist, feel my pulse hammering, and I think of my mother at that desk for forty years, never once getting a night like this one, a whole town turning out loud to say she mattered.
I am going to win it for her tonight if I have to arm-wrestle Harold Fenwick for it across that folding table.
Fenwick gavels us to order twenty minutes late and does not look glad about the crowd. The five board members sit with a water pitcher and a stack of the consolidation paperwork I have come to hate the sight of.
“We’ll dispense with preliminaries,” he says. “Everyone knows why we’re here.”
“We surely do,” somebody calls from the hall, and the room laughs, and his jaw goes tight.
When he calls the library item, I stand. I don’t go to the little podium. I stay where I am, in the middle of my own people, and open my mother’s ledger.
“Three weeks ago,” I say, “this board told me the Langston branch was a line item you couldn’t justify. Saturday night, this town raised nineteen thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars to justify it for you.”
The room breaks into applause. Fenwick gavels it flat.
“Nobody disputes the fundraiser was a success, Miss Barnes.” He folds his hands.
“But a fundraiser is one night. This board deals in years. Nineteen thousand dollars is a lovely gesture. It does not fix a shortfall that comes due again next fiscal year, and the year after that. We cannot run a public institution on a good party.” He almost looks sorry about it. “Sentiment is not a budget.”
And here’s the thing. He’s right. I’ve known he’s right for weeks. I came ready.
* * *
“You’re right,” I say, and the room goes quiet, surprised at me. “A party isn’t a plan. So here’s the plan.”
I open the ledger to the pages I’ve built all month.
“Books and Boots isn’t a night. It’s annual, first Saturday of June, every single year, and it already has a volunteer committee of forty who signed up before I left my house tonight.
The library is chartering a Friends nonprofit to hold the money and raise more year-round, and Andrea Delaney is doing the paperwork for free, because her mother learned to read in my mother’s chair. ”
Fenwick isn’t ready to fold. “A nonprofit is a name on a form, Miss Barnes. Who runs it? Who keeps it running when the excitement wears off, and it’s February, and nobody wants to volunteer in the cold?”
“I do.” I don’t blink. “I ran the whole thing in my head for a month before I walked in this door. And I am not alone.”
“Says who?”
“Says the forty who signed the committee sheet. Says the elementary school, which is committing to field trips. Says the Sterling family, who this afternoon endowed the summer reading program, in my mother’s name, in perpetuity.
” I let it land. “You want to know who keeps this library running, Mr. Fenwick? This room does. You’re looking at your answer, and it will not sit down. ”
And every time I name a commitment, the person who made it stands up in the crowd so the board can see their face.
Ruthanne stands. Anson stands. The school principal stands.
Forty volunteers stand, one after another, until half the room is on its feet and Harold Fenwick is watching his tidy, inevitable conclusion come apart in front of him in real time.
A little girl no higher than the board table gets nudged forward by her mama and pipes out, clear as a bell, “I learned to read there!” and the whole room melts, and even Delores Pruitt puts a hand to her chest.
“Point of order,” he tries, over the swell of it. “These commitments aren’t binding, they aren’t in the record…”
“Then put ’em in the record!” Anson hollers back, and the room roars, and Fenwick’s little microphone is no match for two hundred lungs.
Delores Pruitt, the board member who has said nothing all night, leans into her mic. “Harold. My grandbabies do the summer reading at that library.” She sets down her pen. “I’m satisfied.”
A low, hungry sound goes through the crowd. Young Tom Bracey glances at the two hundred voters filling his sightline and locates his conscience with impressive speed. “I’ll second maintaining the branch.”
Fenwick taps his gavel, buying himself a breath. He looks at the paperwork he came in so sure of. He looks at Delores. He looks at a room that is not going to let him walk out of this building having voted the other way.
“I have always been a friend to this library,” he tells a room that knows better. “All in favor of maintaining the Langston branch.”
Four hands go up before he finishes the sentence. Then, slow and last and sour, his own. It carries, and Fenwick bangs the gavel like the whole thing was his idea, and the room comes down like a wave.
Two hundred people cheering in a room built for twelve is a sound I will still be hearing on my deathbed. My mother’s ledger is open against my chest to a page in her own handwriting, and I swear I feel her somewhere in all that noise.
* * *
People are hugging me. The knitting circle is crying into their cardigans. Somebody holds a phone up over the crowd to call somebody who couldn’t come. My mother’s ledger is getting crushed against a dozen chests and I do not care one bit.
I saved it. We saved it. The thing my mother built, the thing I came home for, the thing I finally stood up in front of a whole town for, is going to outlast every one of us.
Anson is shaking hands like he won an election. Deputy Gil is trying to make people file out in an orderly fashion and being ignored by all of them. Fenwick slips out a side door, and nobody notices but me, and I haven’t got a drop of anything left to spend on him.
And through all of it, over all the heads, I find him.
Perry’s in the back by the door, where he’s stood the whole meeting, not saying one word, letting it be mine.
He’s leaning on the cane, and there’s a look on his face I have never once seen on Perry Sterling in fourteen years of watching him.
He looks humbled. He looks like a man standing near a thing he doesn’t believe he’s earned the right to be close to.
I don’t remember crossing the room. One second I’m buried in the knitting circle and the next I’m in front of him, and the roar of two hundred people drops away to nothing, and it’s just us and a folding chair and a propped-open door.
“You endowed the summer reading program,” I say. “In my mother’s name. You didn’t tell me.”
“Wasn’t mine to announce.” He shrugs, and it costs him. Everything tonight costs him. “It’s hers. Ought to have her name on it, not mine.”
And that is the thing that does it. Not the saddle. Not three hundred phone calls. Not turning down Dallas in front of God and the county. It’s that he put my mother’s name on a gift and then stood in the back of the room so no one would clap for him over it.
I have spent three weeks holding the line. I’ve spent fourteen years, if I’m honest. And I am so bone-tired of loving this man from a safe distance.
“Perry.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m done saying we’ll see.”
His breath catches. “Kylie…”
“I forgive you.” My voice cracks and I let it crack. “I forgive you, and I’m in love with you, and I have been since I was twelve years old, and I am done pretending the safe little version of my life is the one I actually want. I want the one with you in it. All the way in it. No more distance.”
“I’m done too,” I say, before he can answer, because now that it’s coming it won’t stop.
“No more desk between us. No more fourteen years. No more watching you from across a room and calling it enough.” I flatten my hand on his chest, over the wild go of his heart.
“I am not a secret you keep anymore, Perry Sterling. I’m a woman you chose out loud, in front of everybody. So you had better mean it.”
“I have never meant one thing this much in my whole life,” he says.
For a second Perry Sterling, who has kept a smooth word ready for every occasion he ever met, doesn’t have one.
His eyes go bright and wet. His jaw works.
And then he lets the cane clatter to the floor, just drops it, and takes my face in both his big hands like I’m the only solid thing left in a spinning world.
“Say it again,” he breathes.
“I love you.”
“Not that part.” A wrecked, breaking grin. “The part where you’re done keeping your distance.”
So I close the last of it myself, in front of two hundred people and my mother’s ledger and the whole crowing county, and I kiss Perry Sterling like I’ve been waiting fourteen years to do exactly this. Because I have.
He kisses me back like a drowning man breaking the surface, one hand fisted in my hair and the other splayed wide and warm across my back, holding me up, holding me there, and I feel him shaking, this man who never shakes, come apart at a kiss in a county meeting room.
The room, which I completely forgot was there, absolutely loses its mind.
* * *
When we finally break apart, breathless, foreheads pressed together and the county still hollering all around us, he murmurs it low, just for me.
“Take me home, Barnes. I’ve been standing on this knee two hours, and I am about to do something that requires me to be lying down.”
I laugh straight into his mouth. “That the only reason?”
“Not even close,” he says.
He bends and scoops the cane up off the floor, and I duck under his arm to take his weight, and we walk out of that packed room together, slow and crooked, past every soul in Langston, and not one of them is looking at the ledger anymore.
Ruthanne calls out that she’s knitting us something and we do not want to know what.
Novaleen presses a box of cinnamon rolls into my free hand for the road.
Outside, the summer dark is warm and thick with cut grass and somebody’s barbecue smoke, and the crickets are going full tilt, and Perry stops me on the courthouse steps under the one working streetlight and kisses me again, slow this time, unhurried, like a man with all the time in the world and every intention of spending every last minute of it right here.
And I take him home.